is there any way to place multiple gears from one robot in autonomous?
If you can convince an alliance partner to give up theirs and somehow support it fully and drop it in a reliable manner, go for it.
To kinda elaborate further on Cal’s response, no not really. You cannot legally enter your opponent’s LAUNCHPAD to get to your retrieval zone, so you can’t get to your stock of gears. Even if you could, you cannot go past the white line in the loading lane to load a gear, so that’s out. You can’t get one out of your own alliance station’s loading station because of the same reason. The only way you could do it if both alliance decided to go full scale hard core Cooperition. One alliance gives up their pre loaded gear, puts on a specific spot inside the neutral zone, then the other alliance grabs it after putting a gear into the airship and then putting that second gear into your airship.
In short, no. No team is going to put the time to put this autonomous mode to either never use, or just use to benefit the other alliance only. Bragging points only.
That’s creative, and I don’t think I’ve heard that idea from anyone before, and I certainly hadn’t thought of it myself. I don’t think that’s how one robot would end up doing a two (or three) GEAR auto, though. There are several threads already that discuss some possibilities that are more likely.
It won’t happen often, but it will happen that a team gets two GEARS in auto.
That’s more like what will happen
You just need the partner to have the gear half on top of their bot, so that when auto starts it slides off. You’d need a floor gear pickup of course, but after that, finding the gear on the floor shouldn’t be too hard considering that it’s bright yellow 
There is some use and that is playoffs. Lets say one robots places their gear. The other robot can do a two gear auto while the other robot is a high goal shooter. The high goal shooter can immediately drive to the hoppers, dump it into their robot and start shooting in autonomous. This will easily get you alliance over 40 kPa in auto for scoring the fuel and 20 more (or a RP in quals) for the fuel. Meanwhile the two gear auto robot has placed their preload and placed the shooter teams preload. That is 120 points from gears, and another 60 from fuel for an 180 point autonomous. Keep in mind the fourth rotor is worth 140 points in playoffs.
A 2 gear auto is only worth the effort if all 3 gears get placed on a peg and start roters in auto. Otherwise you haven’t accomplished anything worthy of the complexity required for this auto.
I’m not saying it won’t happen, because teams are clearly looking at it, but I don’t see the benefit of it.
Another way to get a GEAR from an alliance partner is to recreate the LIFT on your robot. Lots of robots are relying on the Human Player to lift the GEAR out of their robot already. So a horizontal rod on a vertical actuator might be easier to work with than expecting the alliance partner to drop the GEAR and pick it up then score it. But either way, I still consider placing a GEAR and scoring FUEL to be more beneficial than scoring two GEARs.
If your partner can place a gear onto a lift, they should just do it on an actual lift. If they can’t place a gear onto a lift, then this strategy isn’t helpful. If they’re 50-50, this is only good if it’s somehow easier to place onto your robot than the actual lift, and even then, was it worth all that extra effort?
Getting three GEARS up to the pilots in auto means that only 3 are now needed to get the third ROTOR spinning, and “only” nine to complete all four. It might be more about saving time than scoring auto points. Maybe.
Nope. Not at all. As I said, scoring a GEAR and FUEL is far more helpful. But if for some reason a team decides that scoring two GEARs is important, there’s more than one way to do it.
Is it possible? Perhaps. Is it really worth it? Probably not. It’s much easier to cheesecake a gear holder onto a pushbot rather than come up with a complex auto that drops off a gear, finds and picks up another one, and then navigates back to the peg within about 10 sec (it takes a bit of time to get the gear on and start up the rotor). It’s much easier on the human players and the robots if three robots are placing one gear each.
Cheesecaking a box is easier than cheesecaking a camera and autonomous code to place the gear on a peg. I’d say, cheesecake a “drive forward” bit of auto code for teams that can’t do that, and ask them to place their gear precariously on their bumper.
G27. One-GEAR limit. ROBOTS may not control more than one GEAR at a time.
Violation: FOUL. If strategic, TECH FOUL and YELLOW CARD.
I mayou just be reading the thread here wrong but it seems add if this rule has been over looked.
One GEAR at a time does not preclude multi-GEAR autonomous.
Nothing stops you from going back to grab a second or third from your alliance partners. Same rule somewhat applied last year for Boulders, but that didn’t stop a few teams from pioneering 2 ball autos.
2 gear auto probably only makes sense in Champs elims, because it’s mainly useful as bonus points in excess of a hopper dumping high goal auto.
First, 2 gear auto is only useful if you’re going for 3 total gears in auto. Otherwise the second gear is useless and you should have shot fuel instead of fetched it. Yes, I’m assuming a 2 gear auto team could also gear + high goal. That seems entirely reasonable to me.
Second, you need a reason to do it. Scenarios:
- All three robots can auto gear, 2 can gear + fuel. Call this +40 for gears, +16 for fuel. So +56 in this case.
- Third pick can’t auto. +20 gears, +16 fuel. +36
- Third pick can’t auto, someone can hopper + shoot. say that’s an extra +25 fuel over #2. +61 for this auto.
- Third pick can’t auto, so you need to auto for it to get 3 gears. +40 gears, + 8 fuel, +48 points.
- Third pick can auto, 2nd can hopper, 1st can 2 gear. +40 gears, +33 fuel. +77 total.
5 is the winner, but only works if you have two highly auto capable robots on the alliance, and a 3rd competent robot. Needless to say, this is a rare alliance.
4 is another 2 gear auto. But if you’re in this situation and can pick between 2 gear auto and hopper + shoot, you should hopper + shoot unless you have terrible accuracy.
Basically, if you can catch and hit enough balls from the hopper to make +20 points, you should be refining that auto first, since it’s useful in many more situations. If you get that dialed, then you should think about a 2 gear auto, though you’ll probably never use it.
Manual section 4.2 Match Setup, item D precludes this from being legal (assuming you are talking about it being placed there before the match starts and a robot doesn’t deposit it there in auto):
GEARS
D. One (1) available to each team to preload in their ROBOT (any not preloaded are
staged with GEARS in E)
E. Eighteen (18) in each LOADING LANE (staged on the carpet between the LOADING
STATION and the STARTING LINE)
F. One (1) in each AIRSHIP
I know but it seemed like that rule was being over looked. And the only way to do it would involve a gear picker upper thing. Then you have to me the robot find the gear on the floor where ever it will be and then accurately pick it up in the time allotted. If you can make your robot score a gear and go back to pick up another from the ground and then score it, more power to you.